Boman's favourite work, The Pickwick Papers
old Dickens-fellowship, and the Haarlem
Branch, half a century younger. But has
Chesterton's longed-for Dickens revival
been followed half a century later by
something similar here, this time instigated
by Bomans? It has been suggested that our
local branch is the product of a joke which
has got out of hand; in which case one
might care to recall Hegel's thesis, refer
red to by Marx in 'Der achtzehnte Brumai-
re' (The Eighteenth of Brumaire), namely
that all great facts and figures in world
history happen as it were twice; once as a
tragedy, and once as a farce. I am far
from regarding the Dickens Fellowship as
a tragedy, but there is an element in the
Haarlem Branch which can be seen as
farce. This element was already present in
its founder. A certain ambiguity characte
rized this traditionalist, who felt the need
both to cherish and to bypass the traditi
ons, to honour them and to play them
down. In my view, we still celebrate
Dickens here with the same kind of duali
ty. In a wider context, our Haarlem
Branch has been not so much an attempt to
restore Dickens, but rather an inward
migration into a country full of memories,
happiness, conviviality, play and mystifi
cation, in the awareness that it all belongs
to the past. Perhaps tragedy and farce are
in fact not so very far apart. Bomans'
Dickens, dripping with roguishness, was
intended as an attempt to revive values for
which Catholicism, now apparently in its
death throws, once stood. He levelled his
humanely based criticism at the rigid,
unworkable aspects of those values, always
from within the system. His vision of
Dickens has not remained unchallenged,
as, for example, a few years ago by the
novelist-essayist Maarten 't Hart.8 But
even this criticism can do nothing to dimi
nish the role which Bomans played - in
both senses of the word - in the Dickens
revival inspired by Catholics and Chester
ton, in the Netherlands.
Perhaps, after an entire day filled with
information about the reception of Dickens
in different countries where the author
himself went on his travels and onto which
he directed the spotlight of his genius, you
expected something from me about Dic
kens's visit to the Netherlands. If so, I
must unfortunately inform you that I have
touched on a sore spot. There are Dicken-
sians in our country whom I prefer to
describe as enthusiasts rather than realists,
who move heaven and earth to find evi
dence that the great author once visited the
Netherlands en route to Denmark, on his
way to meet that other great story-teller of
the 19th century, Hans Christian Ander
sen. Andersen is supposed to have passed
on to Dickens the tale of the sexton and
the goblins, and on the basis of this suppo
sition, such a visit would have to have
taken place in 1837. Others maintain that
when Dickens was en route to visit Ander
sen in 1849, he met a notary clerk in Hol-
40
